Heroic Fiction: The Epic Tradition and American Novels of the Twentieth Century

"All my life I have been looking for something," says
the narrator of Invisible Man. That he remains nameless
throughout the book is of the utmost importance, for
the thing he is seeking is an identity he is doomed
never to find. He is never called anything more precise
than Boy and Brother. Consequently, the world cannot
"see" him, cannot recognize individuality in him, although it still oppresses him as a member of a despised
racial group and keeps him running from its wrath. He
is a black Adam in a perverse Eden ruled by white men
who are like gods: "the white folks, authority, the
gods, fate, circumstances -- the force that pulls your
strings until you refuse to be pulled any more." In one
striking passage the narrator reflects on the white men
who furnished the scholarship money for him to attend
a Negro college in the South as "those who had set me
here in this Eden. . . . This was our world, they said
as they described it to us, this our horizon and its earth,
its seasons and its climate, its spring and its summer,
and its fall and harvest some unknown millennium
ahead; and these its floods and cyclones, and they themselves our thunder and lightning. . . ."1 What specifically incurs the wrath of the gods against Boy is the
offense he has given to Mr. Norton, one of the white
trustees of the college. The college is partially Norton's
creation; his "destiny is being made there" in the sense

Print this page

While we understand printed pages are helpful to our users, this limitation is necessary
to help protect our publishers' copyrighted material and prevent its unlawful distribution.
We are sorry for any inconvenience.